Search results for "Public Administration"

MATCHING VOCATIONAL TRAINING AND LABOUR MARKET DEMANDS – THE OPINION OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS

2013

Matching vocational education and training (VET) competencies with actual labour market demands is an increasing challenge for European VET systems. This requires innovation in national VET systems and sets new tasks for public administrations that are responsible for the implementation of the VET systems. The aim of the research is to study the opinion of relevant stakeholders regarding innovation in VET provision. Textual analysis and expert survey among various stakeholders have been carried out. Conclusion has been drawn that experts and social partners express increasing awareness regarding the need of VET innovation. This requires continued research, especially on the interests and mo…

BOARD GOVERNANCE: DOES OWNERSHIP MATTER?

2019

Good governance is crucial to achieving an organization's mission. Nevertheless, little is known about how the structure of governance is influenced by the nonprofit (NPO) or for‐profit ownership (FPO) structure of an organization, partly because they tend to be active in different sectors. In this paper we overcome this challenge by using data from a global sample of 392 microfinance institutions. The results show that the average NPO has a larger board, more female directors, and a higher number of board meetings than the average FPO. Moreover, where there are larger boards and more frequent board meetings, this has a positive effect on the financial performance of NPOs. It is thus confir…

EU Refugee Policies and Politics in Times of Crisis: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

2017

Phenomena such as civil war, protracted conflict, and deteriorating internal security, especially in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Asia, have triggered massive departures of civilian populations in recent years. The war in Syria alone has displaced over 5 million people (UNHCR, 2017a). While most of these forced migrants are either internally displaced or remain in Syria’s immediate neighbourhood, the numbers of those trying to come to Europe have steeply increased in 2015 and 2016. In each of these two years more than 1.2 million asylum-seekers submitted their asylum claims in the EU (Eurostat, 2017a), as compared to 625,000 in 2014 (Eurostat, 2015, p. 4). This represents the larges…

Alterable electorates in the context of residential mobility

1988

In some circumstances, politicians set about altering the composition of their electorate with a view to increasing their chances of being re-elected. A hypothesis along these lines is formulated in the context of local elections and residential mobility. Although the hypothesis is general, an assessment of its validity implies auxiliary assumptions related to a specific spatio-temporal context. That is done with reference to conditions prevailing in post-war French metropolitan areas. In the empirical part of the paper, some of the implications are submitted to tests on demographical and political data. On the basis of the tests, and although alternative explanations of the findings are po…

La economía social y solidaria en Grecia

2017

El 31 de octubre de 2016 el Parlamento griego aprobó la Ley 4430/2016 de Economía Social y Solidaria (ESS) con el propósito de difundir esta forma alternativa de organización de la actividad económica; apoyar y fortalecer proyectos productivos autogestionarios y de emprendimiento social colectivo, y regular las Empresas Sociales Cooperativas y las Cooperativas de Trabajadores. En este trabajo hemos analizado las principales características de la ESS griega, principalmente en relación con otros modelos europeos; y los distintos tipos de empresas que integra, subrayando las diferencias entre ellas y sus principales características frente a otras instituciones próximas como las cooperativas so…

Strategic Responses: A Survey Experiment on Opposition to Pension Reforms*

2013

The responses given in opinion polls on future policy reforms reflect both subjective expectations and preferences. We disentangle these factors using data from a controlled survey experiment conducted in Germany. At the time of the experiment, an increased retirement age had been proposed as part of a pension reform. Thus, the survey respondents faced an incentive to give biased responses. By understating their expected work ability at the age of retirement, they could make the increase of the retirement age a less attractive policy option. We find evidence for such strategic response behavior, and this strategic bias appears to be stronger in former communist East Germany.

Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and the Social Science of Marxian Economics

2018

This article supports claims that critical realism philosophy of science, as refounded in the hands of Roy Bhaskar, offers valuable knowledge enhancing insight into the advancement of Marx’s research program. However, it maintains that key principles set out by Bhaskar have not been adequately assimilated by those working with critical realism in the field of Marxist studies. When they are properly considered, they point to the necessity of reconstructing Marx’s corpus on a divergent basis from the conventional form it has assumed since the codification of “Marxism” by Karl Kautsky in the late nineteenth century as an overarching theory of history or historical materialism, wherein Marx’s e…

The European Public Sphere and the Media: Europe in Crisis - Edited by A. Triandafyllidou, R. Wodak and M. Krzyżanowski

2010

The 2015 Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union

2016

‘Experimental Union’ and Baltic Sea cooperation: the case of the European Union’s Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR)

2018

In the past, Baltic Sea cooperation has been characterized by a plethora of actors, embracing a wide range of policy objectives, such as the establishment of a good environmental status for the regional sea. In 2009, the European Council endorsed the European Union’s (EU) Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) as a new tool in the repertoire of Cohesion Policy and European Territorial Cooperation (ETC). The EUSBSR seeks to foster cross-sectoral coordination and functional cooperation in policy areas of ‘macro-region-level’ relevance, such as transport infrastructure, economic development and environmental protection – thus projecting a ‘soft space’ of transnational Baltic Sea cooperati…